If there’s one good thing to be said about the new “activity-based" workplace, it is the fact that you can get away from the loudmouths.

When they no longer have a desk to call their own, people can pick up their laptops and mobile phones and move away from the Phantom of the Opera-style guffaws across the slim partitions, separating them from the loudest laugh in the office.

They can escape the phone-slamming, the prattling, the bickering with family back home, the coughs and sneezes, the loud watermelon-snacking and all the other auditory crimes that take place when you are trying to concentrate.

When you can sit anywhere you like you are no longer forced into unwilling intimacy with colleagues you bump elbows with every working day.

You will no longer have to develop tolerance for opposing political views, weird-smelling food (or people) or different lifestyles to your own.

Boomers won’t have to share space with annoyingly young people who, in turn, can flirt and make party plans as much as they like with others in their age group.

People can self-segregate and form comfortable cliques, colonising space each morning my spreading out their belongings across their chosen desks to ward off interlopers.

Possibly, this would have been just the solution for bureaucrat William Red, who claimed “workers’ comp" because of hearing damage and mental health problems because of a colleague’s “piercingly loud voice".

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Red, who worked at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base, moved to another workplace and was unsuccessful on his appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for compensation for trauma, acoustic shock and anxiety, according to a report in HC Magazine.

“The former naval base official said his colleague ‘shrieked, cackled and chortled’ while on the phone at their office at volumes exceeding nightclub music levels (100 decibels)", according to the report.

However, the tribunal members decided his tinnitus (ringing in the ears) was caused by noise damage that occurred prior to his work at Garden Island.

While open plan offices have been a boon to bean-counters (who love squeezing people into small spaces) and architects (who love wide, open spaces), they are associated with greater levels of stress and lower productivity for the people who work in them.

People who don’t have the option to move now bring to work their own noise-cancelling headphones, so the office starts to look like a crowd of diligent Oompa-Loompahs from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Swedish environmental psychologist Helena Jahncke found that productivity levels drop as much as 10 per cent if you can hear what your colleagues are saying around you.